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Welcome to the OpenKinect project

About

OpenKinect is an open community of people interested in making use of the amazing Xbox Kinect hardware with our PCs and other devices. We are working on free, open source libraries that will enable the Kinect to be used with Windows, Linux, and Mac.

Some general information about how Kinect works can be found in this document.

Source code is available here: https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect

Get started right away by installing the software to your platform.

Communications

If you want to participate or just watch the progress of the OpenKinect effort, subscribe to the [OpenKinect mailing list]. In the application form, please tell us something about yourself and you'll be approved automatically. You could also subscribe to a low-traffic [announcement-only mailing list].

You can follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/openkinect Please use the #tag #openkinect when tweeting your work

You can meet people in your area working on OpenKinect through Meetup Groups:

• NYC
• QC-Colab Davenport, IA

You can also chat with people developing on OpenKinect software on IRC: #OpenKinect on irc.freenode.net.

If you need an IRC client, check:

• Chatzilla (for firefox): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/16/
• http://webchat.freenode.net/
• http://quassel-irc.org/
• http://www.mirc.com/

Channel logs (Daily rotation) can be found at http://falcon4ever.pcsx2.net/kinect/logs/

API Documentation

• High Level - High-level API documentation

Wrappers

• Python
• C Synchronous - Provides functions to get data instead of callbacks
• Actionscript
• C#
• Java

Utilities

• Record - Dumps Kinect data to PPM, PGM, and a bin dump for RGB, Depth, and Accel respectively.
• Fakenect - libfreenect simulator/mock interface that lets you use the kinect demos without having a kinect (plays back data from Record)

Knowledge base

• lsusb output - Device identifier output
• USB Devices - Overview of the hardware devices
• Protocol Documentation - General information about the Kinect USB procotol
• USB Protocol Information - Other information about the Kinect USB protocol
• Init Analysis - Messing with various init sequences
• Imaging Information - Information about the imaging data returned by the Kinect
• Research Material - Research material for software layer implementation
• Hardware_info - Hardware information
• Calibration - Gathering information for including calibration facilities

Links

Installation/Compilation Guides

• Installation/Compilation Guides
• http://www.spoofscript.com/blog/?p=327 - Compiling OpenKinect on a stubborn OSX 10.6.5

Comment Threads

• http://ladyada.net/learn/diykinect/ - How the Kinect was hacked very detailed overview of what was involved
• http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/11/04/the-open-kinect-project-the-ok-prize-get-1000-bounty-for-kinect-for-xbox-360-open-source-drivers/ - Adafruit's competition. Comment thread contains list of some of the people working on this.
• http://hackaday.com/2010/11/04/kilobuck-open-kinect-project-prize/ - Hackaday's coverage of the bounty. Again, interesting comment thread.

Tech

• http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft-Kinect-Teardown/4066/ - Hardware teardown. Chip info is here. (via adafruit)
• http://kinecthacks.net/kinect-pinout/ - Pinout info of the Kinect Sensor
• http://www.primesense.com/?p=535 - Primesense reference implementation (via adafruit thread)
• http://www.sensorland.com/HowPage090.html - How sensors work and the bayer filter
• http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/ - Model for branching within Git
• http://www.numenta.com/htm-overview/education/HTM_CorticalLearningAlgorithms.pdf - Suggestions to implement pseudocode near the end
• http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide.html Which licenses are compatible with which

Kinect Themed sites

• http://www.reddit.com/r/openkinect/ OpenKinect news and discussion community
• http://www.kinectHacks.net - Kinect hacking blog and forum
• http://www.freenect.com/ - Kinect hacking news
• http://www.modmykinect.com - The innovation begins.
• http://www.Bodensee-Deal.de/ - Kinect hacking news in German

Random

• Linux contribution procedure http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=blob;f=Documentation/SubmittingPatches
• Git project contribution procedure http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=blob_plain;f=Documentation/SubmittingPatches;hb=HEAD